Nocturnal Emission and Tefillin

December 25th, 2015

Hello Rabbi- I had a very awkward incident occurr, and I wonder if I handled it properly. I took a nap in my car in a hospital parking lof, and suffered a nocturnal emission of semen. I had to enter the hospital to pick up someone. I very quickly and ineffectively wiped off some of the zerah in the bathroom. We later got stuck in horrible traffic, and I was forced to put on my tefillin and daven mincha by the side of the road. It was around an hr after the nocturnal emission.So two questions : 1) Did I act properly in putting on tefillin and davening? The zera was possibly dry by then, and I had removed some of it earlier. 2) was I pogem in the kedusha of my tefillin?
Thanks very much.
Yaakov

Answer:

Ideally one should treat semen as one would excrement and not say brachos and daven while on one’s skin even covered. However here where you wiped away what you could and would have missed tefillin and mincha, you correctly relied on the lenient opinions that semen is not like excrement and that covered [even] excrement one may say brachos with.

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